Future directions for camera systems in electron microscopy.

Publisher Summary Charge-coupled device (CCD) invented in 1970, soon became the sensor of choice in many imaging applications, particularly for video cameras and camcorders. This chapter reviews current efforts to scale up lens-coupled CCD camera and make a system capable of exceeding the spatial resolution of film, while maintaining single-electron sensitivity. This lens-coupled CCD system represents the current state-of-the-art in CCD-based systems, and it also demonstrates the great engineering effort required to achieve these key performance benchmarks when the detector is based on a resolution-limiting scintillation screen. The chapter discusses the development of a parallel effort to produce a radiation-tolerant system that can withstand direct electron bombardment. It also describes efforts required to adapt the pixel array detector (PAD) that is commonly used in X-ray diffraction, and discusses the development of a groundbreaking prototype system based on an active pixel sensor (APS). This early implementation of an APS-based direct detection detector (DDD) has already delivered unprecedented performance in many areas exceeding the fundamental capabilities of CCD-based systems.